by Tom Bower
At that moment, Livingstone was walking up the stairs in the Millbank studios in London, followed by live television cameras. He was confronted by John Mann. ‘You’re a disgrace!’ shouted Mann, who by chance was in the building and had heard about Livingstone’s comments. The ex-mayor, Mann continued, was ‘a Nazi apologist’ and ‘a lying racist’. Watching the saga live on TV with others in his office, Milne laughed, as if to say: ‘We’re on the inside. We’re resisting the powers-that-be.’
In LBC’s studio, Livingstone had pronounced in his nasal monotone, ‘It’s over the top to think of anti-Semitism and racism as exactly the same thing.’ He explained that ‘Anti-Semites don’t just hate Jews in Israel, they hate them in Golders Green as well,’ by which he seemed to mean that since he hated only Israeli Jews, he was not an anti-Semite. He added that, ‘as a statement of fact’, Shah had been right to say that in ordering the Holocaust Hitler had acted legally. The Holocaust was not a crime. Livingstone believed that the Jews had cooperated, and ever since had exploited what had happened to them to justify the creation of Israel. To escape Mann, he locked himself inside a Millbank disabled lavatory. Milne would protect him.
Corbyn was preparing to lay a wreath on a workers’ memorial in Grimsby. In more calls, he agreed with Milne that they had to defend Livingstone. As in all disputes about history, ideology and political strategy, Corbyn regarded Milne as the Keeper of the Line, the reliable intellectual who guarded their purity. ‘Ken has a point,’ Milne told Corbyn. To suggest that Hitler was a Zionist and the Holocaust was not a crime, said Milne, was not racist. Ken was not wrong to ‘criticise Zionism, even if the Zionists happened to be Jews’. Their old comrade was the victim of Zionists, and was not anti-Semitic.
In Corbyn’s office, Josh Simons, a policy adviser who was Jewish, watched as Milne seethed. Britain, exclaimed the Keeper of the Line, had committed a crime in 1917 by promising a homeland to the Jews. Another office member condemned the ‘Jewish conspiracy to get Livingstone’. At this, Milne turned to Simons and in an interrogatory tone demanded to know his opinion as a Jew. His snap question followed a lengthy and detailed inquisition during a recent train journey about Simons’s religion. Milne and the others, Simons concluded, neither understood two thousand years of anti-Semitism, nor wanted to.
By the time Livingstone emerged from Millbank onto the street, some Labour MPs were demanding his suspension. Their protests were parried by Milne, who wanted Mann, and not Livingstone, suspended. The protesters were also snubbed by Corbyn, who told them that the row had been created by his own opponents because they were ‘nervous and jealous of his power’. Anyway, he agreed with Livingstone that it was ‘over the top’ to ‘think of anti-Semitism and racism as exactly the same thing’ – Labour ‘does not have a problem with anti-Semitism’. He simply weighed his morality against others’ immorality, and never found himself wanting. He had no desire to understand the complaints being voiced, or to enquire why Jews were so aggrieved. Like Milne and Livingstone, he refused to capitulate to Jewish complaints. Late that afternoon, Josh Simons walked out of the office and never returned.
Around the same time, Livingstone was approached by a journalist while out shopping in north London. People should calm down, he said. But they didn’t; the pressure on Corbyn only increased. By the end of the afternoon he was forced to bow to Iain McNicol’s insistence that Livingstone be suspended. In turn, he demanded that Mann should also be suspended for bringing the party into disrepute. After hearing that Mann had become the target of serious physical threats from Corbynistas, he was persuaded to tone down his punishment: Rosie Winterton was told to issue a reprimand. Along the leader’s corridor, only McDonnell demanded Livingstone’s expulsion from the party. Old hard-left vendettas never die.
In her Westminster office, Louise Ellman kept silent. ‘I didn’t want to dig because it was too scary to find the truth that people are truly hostile,’ she recalled. ‘I had a trauma about the whole thing. It was too horrendous to believe this existed in the Labour Party.’ Corbyn never sought her out. Instead he spoke to the film director Ken Loach, who was responsible for making his election videos. Loach, a well-known anti-Zionist, had in 1987 directed Perdition, a play at the Royal Court depicting Zionists as collaborators with the Nazis in the extermination of Europe’s Jews, although following protests the production was cancelled before its first preview performance. Years later he corrected himself, but in 2016 he emphatically denounced the persecution of Livingstone. Like Corbyn, Loach supported the Palestinians’ return to their homeland, but to avoid overtly endorsing the destruction of the Jewish state, both men had supported a two-state solution until the creation of the Stop the War Coalition. Then, with their embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood, that solution – which implied the recognition of Zionist Israel – became unacceptable. By its silence, the coalition endorsed Hamas’s demand for Israel’s obliteration.
On his return to London, Corbyn was faced by irate Labour MPs. ‘Vile, offensive and crass,’ said Tom Watson about his leader’s sympathetic reaction to Livingstone. In response, Corbyn denounced a ‘witch-hunt’ contrived to undermine his leadership. ‘There is not a problem,’ he told the Guardian, although he granted that ‘It’s not a happy day.’ In a further public statement, he declared that he was ‘absolutely against anti-Semitism’, but during a telephone call he told Milne that an article by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian urging him to confront Labour’s problem was ‘utterly disgusting subliminal nastiness’. His criticism was shared by Michael White, the Guardian’s former political editor, who on the paper’s website condemned the ‘idiots’ who swallowed the Tory plot to construct phoney anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.
Beyond Westminster, the Corbynistas broke cover. ‘Labour’s Blairite right wing,’ emailed Martin Mayer, a Unite representative on the NEC, ‘have used the smear of anti-Semitism to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.’ With fraternal loyalty, Piers Corbyn, an inveterate Trotskyist, could not resist joining the fray. Livingstone, he declared with assumed authority, was misunderstood, and his account of Zionists cooperating with Hitler was actually true. There was ‘too much sensitivity around anti-Semitism’. The ex-mayor’s critics, he continued, were ‘pandering to Israel’. Jeremy Corbyn could also take comfort that his stance towards Jews was approved by the historian and Holocaust denier David Irving. ‘Corbyn,’ said Irving, ‘seems like a very fine man.’ He would also be praised by David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who stated: ‘Corbyn has told the truth that it’s not necessarily in the interests of the British people to support the Jewish state.’ The enemy of my enemy is my friend, runs the fourth-century BC Sanskrit treatise on statecraft.
Approval from such right-wing supporters was not enough. Iain McNicol suggested that Corbyn ask Jan Royall, the Labour peer who had undertaken the investigation of anti-Semitism in Oxford, to report on whether the party had a wider problem. Trusted by the Jewish community, Royall would have been ideal. But Corbyn rejected her, and McNicol, a weak man, did not press him.
A more suitable candidate was soon found. ‘Shami wants to come and help,’ Corbyn announced to his office, referring to Shami Chakrabarti, the former head of Liberty, the civil rights group. In the days after the Livingstone debacle, Milne had phoned Chakrabarti. She took the call while standing on the tarmac at Heathrow, where she was about to board a flight for Dublin. Milne told her that the solution to the party’s problems was an inquiry, and she instantly accepted his offer to undertake the face-saver. By the time she landed in Ireland she had agreed that she would not investigate individuals accused of anti-Semitism, but would instead conduct a ‘thematic’ review of the party’s broader culture. To make it palatable to party members, she would also include complaints about Islamophobia, even though that was not an issue either in the media or at Westminster. In addition, to avoid any complaints that she was personally hostile to Labour, she would join the party. Her membership was completed on an app at Dublin
airport. At Milne’s suggestion, she agreed that she would not recommend any disciplinary action. Blandness was required, and Chakrabarti was content to oblige. The public assumption that the respected lawyer would remain staunchly independent was undermined by her own decision not to undertake an unbiased, judicial-style inquiry, but to be as partial as she deemed necessary.
Grateful for the lifebelt, Corbyn announced that Livingstone’s comments were ‘unacceptable’, and that he had appointed Chakrabarti to investigate Labour’s alleged anti-Semitism. ‘She’s trying to find a way into his office,’ concluded one of Corbyn’s staff about the lawyer keen to land a job. ‘And he’s trying to silence his critics.’
Over the following weeks, Chakrabarti listened to hours of harrowing testimony from Jews, not least from female Labour MPs describing the anti-Semitic abuse they had suffered from party members. As the evidence accumulated, she made no attempt to appear independent. ‘Regularly,’ said an eyewitness, ‘Seumas Milne got calls from Shami. He gave her guidance about what he and Corbyn expected.’
Corbyn’s priority, amid talk of a coup to save a broken party without any prospect of power, was to prevent a meltdown in the local elections that were to be held on 5 May. He could not imagine that anti-Semitism would influence the outcome. The raw statistic of 300,000 Jews and three million Muslims living in Britain spoke for itself.
Anticipating disappointment in the 124 council elections, four mayoral elections and two by-elections, the party searched for a scapegoat. The Mirror went back to heaping blame on Tony Blair. Len McCluskey also hit out at the Blairites, accusing Liz Kendall of being ‘nothing short of treacherous’ for criticising Labour for its attitude towards Jews, and berating Ian Austin for ‘behaving despicably’ to undermine Corbyn. Raking up anti-Semitism, said McCluskey, was a ‘cynical attempt to challenge Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership’. There was more than a whiff of old-style Soviet propeganda in this, blaming scheming Jews for the ills of society.
13
Stuck in the Bunker
On election night, Corbyn was happily ensconced in a pub festooned with Fidel Castro posters. He appeared relaxed. ‘I am not a traditional party leader. I do things in a rather different way. Some people are slower at learning things than others.’ His cryptic observation did not deflect from the results. Labour surrendered eighteen seats in England, lost its majority in Wales, and suffered humiliation in Scotland, where the Tories become the official opposition after the SNP lost its overall majority. Although Labour won more votes across Britain than the Tories (who lost forty-eight seats), the 2 per cent swing was well short of the 12 per cent needed in a general election to win a Commons majority. Since the party also lost support in marginal areas, there was no talk about a national revival. ‘The clock is ticking,’ said Jo Cox, echoing the foreboding felt by her colleagues that the party would be out of power ‘until 2030’ because of Corbyn’s ‘weak leadership, poor judgement and mistaken sense of priorities’. At daybreak, Corbyn clung to the one piece of outright good news, Sadiq Khan’s election as London mayor with a 14 per cent majority. His victory, said Diane Abbott, ‘was all about Jeremy’, seemingly forgetting that Khan had deliberately distanced himself from her leader. Corbyn was wounded by the results, but no moderate MP volunteered to strike. ‘I’m carrying on,’ he said, repeating once again that two-thirds of Labour’s members had voted for him.
On 10 May, Khan was invited to address Labour MPs in a Commons committee room. Few came, and with the leader’s chair empty, it looked as if Corbyn had stayed away. In reality, he was sitting to the side of the dimly-lit chamber, arms folded, looking as if he were on the verge of a breakdown. As Khan entered, Corbyn was noticeably reluctant to clap. Many MPs judged the new mayor’s speech to be lacklustre, but agreed with his warning that Labour could not win the next general election, scheduled for 2020, unless the party appealed to non-Corbynistas. At the end, their leader rose gracelessly for the standing ovation. Then he spoke – more hesitantly than usual – to berate any MP who disputed the party’s ‘victory’ in the council elections. His distortion enveloped the room in an awkward silence. He also went on at length about Labour’s success in Islington, and it was left to Peter Hain, now a member of the House of Lords, to break the spell. In Wales, he said in a voice that electrified the meeting, Labour had secured its smallest vote since 1908. ‘Good spinning, Jeremy,’ Hain ended up, ‘but we won’t win in 2020.’
Corbyn had welcomed David Cameron’s announcement of a referendum on EU membership, to be held on 23 June 2016 – six weeks after the council elections. His hostility towards the EU was ideological. Europe, he had told President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in a broadcast conversation in 2014, had ‘suffered appallingly’ because the EU was a capitalists’ club and a barrier to his life’s commitment to ‘build socialism and the fight against capitalism’. The EU, he believed, existed for greedy bankers and multinationals to exploit the working class. If Britain voted to leave, and freed itself from Brussels’ control, a socialist government could prevent British investment abroad and control markets, tariffs and profits – all contrary to EU laws. Both Corbyn and McDonnell wanted to campaign for Britain to leave, but were challenged by Hilary Benn and others in the shadow cabinet. The majority of Labour MPs and the trade unions, said Benn, supported membership. Reluctantly, Corbyn agreed to campaign to remain.
His lifelong opposition to the EU was displayed during a conference of European socialist leaders in Brussels on 17 December. Organised by Jan Royall, the meeting was an ideal opportunity for him to forge relationships and influence the European debate. Instead, he showed his resentment at even being in the city. Detached from any interest in European socialism, he refused to engage in the discussions and fluffed his own presentation. Unable to master the technical details of EU membership without Milne’s help, he retreated into a shell. ‘Did you find it useful?’ Royall asked. ‘Yer,’ he replied while texting his wife about a minor domestic crisis: while roasting a batch of coffee beans, Laura had set them on fire. Coping with that incident provoked the only moment of emotion in Corbyn’s day. On his return to London, he was asked over dinner in King’s Cross with his team, ‘How did it go?’ ‘OK,’ he replied. Milne came to his rescue with a positive summary, but even his brio failed to dispel the impression of an uncertain man.
The remainers’ chances of success, Corbyn knew, depended on Labour voters. David Cameron’s fate was equally bound up in the outcome. If Britain voted leave, Corbyn calculated, the prime minister would be humiliated and the Tories electorally weakened. Those were good reasons not to appear on any platform alongside him. Associating with Tories was repellent to Corbyn anyway, while political collaboration risked repeating Labour’s error during the Scottish independence referendum. To Alan Johnson, appointed to lead Labour’s remain campaign, Corbyn’s reluctance to preach the advantages of EU membership was ‘risible’.
Within weeks of Johnson starting his work, the complications intensified. According to him, three of Corbyn’s closest associates in his office were undermining his efforts. Corbyn ignored him at meetings, and found regular excuses not to appear on the remainers’ platform, while he continued to speak in favour of the IRA and Hamas, spent time protecting anti-Semites within the party, and justified the misery heaped on Venezuela: anything but Europe. He even denounced Sadiq Khan for ‘discrediting’ himself by sharing an event with Cameron. ‘You’re deliberately sending Jeremy to speak in areas where he’s not needed,’ a journalist told Milne. ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ said Milne, laughing. He would not dream of ‘scuppering the vote’.
Corbyn knew the contrary. For Labour supporters minded to vote leave, controlling immigration was critical, but to him those opposed to open borders were racist. True to the vision of Britain as the multicultural, non-white society spun by Bernie Grant forty years earlier, he wanted to ban only low-paid workers from central Europe, particularly in the construction industry – even if that meant fewer houses were built. His a
mbition, he said, was to protect British jobs and wages. To keep ideologically pure, he ordered party officials to remove every reference to immigration from Labour’s campaign. As he knew perfectly well, his stance undermined the remainers’ campaign.
Hilary Benn intervened. Entering Corbyn’s office, he said, ‘You need to think in the language of the national interest.’
Milne laughed. ‘What’s funny about the national interest?’ asked Imran Ahmed, Benn’s assistant. Milne’s dismissive shrug sparked an outburst from Benn directed at Corbyn. Trashing Cameron, he said, was short-sighted. The referendum could be lost. Milne started to interrupt. ‘Shut up!’ Benn shouted, not for the first time. ‘This is for elected people to discuss!’
Corbyn, unnerved, preferred Milne to recite his thoughts. ‘We won’t speak about immigration or the national interest,’ Corbyn told Benn. Soon after, he removed from an important leaflet a personal endorsement written by a party official. The words he deleted ran: ‘I am clear, just like my shadow cabinet, the trade union movement and our members, that it is in the interests of the people of this country to remain in the EU.’ Corbyn’s obduracy was buttressed by McDonnell, who refused to participate in any remain event and vigorously vetted Labour’s literature. He too ordered a pro-European sentence to be struck out from a remain leaflet. Like Corbyn, he knew all too well the effect his personal refusal to participate would have on the remain campaign.
A detailed survey showed that only 20 per cent of voters shared Corbyn’s opinion. During an uncomfortable session in his office, Alan Johnson urged him to avoid a destructive breach with traditional Labour voters. Stony-faced, Corbyn refused to budge. ‘My socialist views are totally unchanged,’ he said. He was even considering a visit to Syrian refugees in Turkey to promote open borders, an incendiary provocation for the remainers.
